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We’ve replaced all the blockchain buzzwords with AI buzzwords. Let’s see if big tech notices
Crypto collapse links
“Bitcoin’s current worth and future potential rest partly in the hands of the Bitcoin Core maintainers, a group who are chosen by their peers and are often vague about their whereabouts. A loose network of donors pays most maintainers’ salaries. At least once, the maintainers secretly patched a bug that bitcoin proponents say could have destroyed the cryptocurrency’s value.”
A snappy, prescient review of crypto, from May 2022: “Its harms are substantial. It has enabled billion dollar criminal enterprises. It has enabled venture capitalists to do securities fraud as their business. It has sucked people in. So either avoid it or help me make it die in a fire.”
The final days of FTX: “Soon, news of FTX’s troubles was spreading beyond headquarters. Rental car agencies in Nassau demanded their vehicles back. Hotels and landlords turned out FTX employees, some of whom moved into properties owned by the company. Many workers rushed to book tickets off the island. ‘If you could get a flight out tomorrow, you would go,’ one recalled.”
AI and chatbot links
“For a fun time, I decided to ask the new “Bing Search” chatbot what it knows about Leif & Thorn. […] By the second answer, the bot had made up a whole nonexistent storyline.”
“How about a robot that instantly pulls and returning info from the internet when requested? Sixteen years ago, three guys had that exact idea—and it didn’t exist. The web was still a greenfield project. And thanks to some great foresight (perhaps too much, if that’s real) they created ActiveBuddy, the startup that built SmarterChild.”
The joke here is “Chat GPT has very prudish sexual ethics“, but in all seriousness: we can all agree that’s not just predictive text, right? Some of those were phrases written by a human professional, once they noticed they were getting certain kinds of questions, where they absolutely couldn’t leave the chatbot to freeball the answers.
The Onion weighs in: Questions That ChatGPT Is Not Allowed To Answer.
“In this post, I catalogue a few of the analogies for “AI” art and how they are useful analogies and how they’re misleading.”
Includes a link to an essay about data compression, and its fascinating failings. “It turned out that the photocopier had judged the labels specifying the area of the rooms to be similar enough that it needed to store only one of them—14.13—and it reused that one for all three rooms when printing the floor plan.“
no subject
Bloomberg Businessweek ran an article earlier this month about the increasingly overlapping Venn diagrams between AI research, effective altruism, and rationalist fanfic,, with a side order of cults and crypto commentary.
Wow....
...I'm back from a heady hour reading these comprehensible explanations and thanks.
When and how did criminals or thieves or swindlers earn the unjudgemental bafflegab of "threat actors"?
Re: Wow....
I believe it's just supposed to be a really broad category. Highly-motivated terrorist networks and 14-year-old trolls who will give up as soon as they get bored are very different -- if you're talking about issues that apply to that whole spectrum of behavior, you're going to need some pretty generic terms.
Re: Wow....
Hmmm, yes that is a spectrum. Taking advantage of networked computers and their users is the common thread.
Reminds me of the Federal penalties involved in mail fraud -- the new technology that crossed the country in the satchels of national employees -- to require specific regulations.
Given the Leap Online since March 2020, I can imagine a near future where networked computers and their users is assumed.